9/01/2008

Sitting on my sofa, being ethical

8·27·08It's easy to get caught up in that nonsense, to lose sight of reality.We are social creatures, and our sanity is highly dependent upon at least a minimum of open interaction with others.Wonderful mistake? Or were we just mistaken about the wonder?I never had any doubts.Don't let go.I love the part right before we start hating each other.Let's go to the park so I can tell you how pretty you look.Let's rent a movie and then not watch it.These aren't my words."Too much ah ha pretty soon boo-hoo."

Come on, none of this is real, you know that.

8·28·08Ha ha ha ha: "The label 'cornucopian' is rarely self-applied, and is most commonly used derogatorily by those who believe that the target is overly optimistic about the resources that will be available in the future."That is great... I'm one of the rare few people (apparently) who is comfortable labeling myself a cornucopian.

According to the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in 1979, residents exhibited a "disturbingly high rate of miscarriages...Love Canal can now be added to a growing list of environmental disasters involving toxics, ranging from industrial workers stricken by nervous disorders and cancers to the discovery of toxic materials in the milk of nursing mothers." In one case, two out of four children in a single Love Canal family had birth defects; one girl was born deaf with a cleft palate, an extra row of teeth, and slight retardation, and a boy was born with an eye defect. A survey conducted by the Love Canal Homeowners Association found that 56% of the children born from 1974-1978 had a birth defect.

Connections I've made never follow through.

Would it be useful to start an organization to advocate certain tenets of scientific thinking? For instance, scientists do not (should not) think in terms of 'absolute truths', but rather in tentative explanations, open to new evidence, and there is nothing dangerous about this thinking, though it is often interpreted to be dangerous.

There must be more of a spectrum to causal interaction than simply A caused B or, A did not cause B. As an example, it was claimed by some religious nuts that Darwinism led to Nazi eugenics. Another example would be people who blame Einstein's physics work as responsible for nuclear weapons, but the relationship between the two is not so simple. Maybe the issue is that many many causal effects had to work together to result both in Nazism and nuclear weapons, and though Einstein's work was integral (and Darwin's was supportive), neither scientist had any real influence over the many hundreds of decisions made by others that eventually lead to those terrible things.

What are the prospects for breaking our current two-party political system? How likely are we to ever change the electoral college system?

Government theory/Economic theory wiki? How about social experiment wiki(s)?What do the people want wiki? What's wrong with the world wiki?

I think part of my rejection of the concept of evil is because it seems that most of what we would deem evil is done by people who do not believe themselves to be doing evil. Just as the catholics burned 17th century geniuses alive to 'save' them from 'hell', most 'evil' that is done is done by people with genuinely good intentions (as Karl Popper said). I suppose a very small portion of people may be truly immoral, or enjoy inflicting or observing pain inflicted on others, which we could probably safely declare to be evil. But for the most part, the grand majority of 'evil' in the world around us is either 1) well intentioned, or 2) unavoidable (e.g. death, accidents, consequences of natural laws of the universe). It seems that to validate the idea of a pervasive evil in the world, we would need to see a number of individuals who actually believed that the 'wrong' thing was good, somehow there is a subtle difference between 'evil' and mere intentionally immoral behavior.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is really pretty.

8·30·08"try to get hired as a vote machine hacker. on election day, don’t do it. you can save the world … sitting on your sofa. and being ethical."Ha ha, "Sitting on your sofa. and being ethical."

What is the likelihood that my belief system will undergo significant changes in the remainder of my life?

9·1·08I need to write an essay about the assumption people make that overcoming gravity would somehow solve energy problems, and mention that in some sense, gravitational energy is recoverable, it is the energy we must use to alter the velocity vector of inertial mass that is so important to overcome. So if technology could be found to decrease the apparent inertial mass of an object, that would be useful. Going around corners would no longer pull you to the outside of the curve, breaks wouldn't have to heat up, and your gas mileage would be exquisite, assuming of course that whatever magical technology you had did not require a constant input of energy close to equal to what you needed to get out of it (which if our current understanding of physics is even close, is awfully unlikely).

Our world ought to be such that the typical statements of fundamentalist christians should be considered psychotic, hilarious, or various other categories of nonsense.

I think it is very important to see how the accumulation of knowledge (maybe better worded as 'scientific progress') has invalidated previously accepted concepts about the world. So that quote Daniel Denett used in his speech, where his friend/collegue recounted the story of 'real magic' and 'not real magic' is an archetypical: the concept of magic was created at a time when so little was understood of the universe that it was more acceptable to believe that good portions of every day life could lie literally beyond human comprehension, but this premise is much less acceptable today. As a result, 'real magic' now refers to the sort of magic that does not exist, while 'not real magic' refers to the sort of magic that actually can be performed (i.e., illusions). Science has progressed in such a way that it has become difficult to even conceive of an aspect of the universe that is immune to scientific investigation—in some sense we could define science as the process of seeking answers indefinitely, in contrast to religion which could be similarly defined as the process of accepting answers as infallible. Anyone who is slightly familiar with the history of science (or simply with modern science) should recognize the danger in believing answers to be infallible; Einstein, Riemann and Galileo (or Copernicus, or lets not forget Bruno), all broke down the previously accepted beliefs in response to the evidence they saw collected before them, though Einstein himself suffered from indoctrination, preventing him from coming to terms with quantum theory. (Though in his defense, the strongest evidence for the theory was all collected after his death.) It is the certainty, the conviction of belief, that makes humans look foolish, and anyone who is truly scientifically minded is aware of this. It is the backbone of Bertrand Russell's essay, "Am I an Atheist or Agnostic?", or more generally any seriously rational person.

The only people I have ever met or heard of, who really truly think of themselves as evil, all convey overwhelming remorse. Which seems to revoke any right to declare them truly evil.

About Me

I enjoy untying knots. I have a deep and unfounded appreciation for all humankind.
What you see is what you get. Except for politicians. And relationships. And book covers. And land mines. And plot twists. And sink holes. And the media. And fashion. And of course ice bergs too.
I find more things than I should profound. I fall in love with every noun, but it is okay because it is not contagious. I am both deeply superficial and superficially deep.